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OPINION

Bibliophiles have no fear about the future

Tom Herzing
Published 3:33 p.m. CT July 22, 2014

This picture taken on September 27, 2013 shows a 400-year-old Kralice's Bible, in the Dietrichstein Palace in Brno during an exhibition marking the 400th anniversary of the last edition of the Kralice's Bible. The Bible belongs to the highlights of the printing arts and the treasures of the Czech language.
(Photo11:
AFP/Getty Images
)

I’m sick of it: another television personality has announced the demise of the book. The reason he knows books are dead is that his latest effusion (and shouldn’t there be a law against autobiographies written by people under 35?) is only available – for twenty-five bucks – electronically. If you want to read about his youthful travails and refined philosophical insights, you have to spend another $100 or so on a Kindle or a Nook.

I remember few books from my early days, though. “The Skeezix” scared the snot out of me. Dick and Jane and Puff and Spot helped drag me to literacy; it took years before I stopped prefacing sentences with “look, look, see …” but I was an impressionable kid.

“Treasure Island” made me a romantic. I could draw a distinct history of my growth and development from Little Golden Books right up to “Beowulf” (“Hwæt. We Gardena in geardagum, / þeodcyninga, þrym gefrunon”doesn’t come up much in cocktail conversations but it was a heck of an effective pick-up line in college beer bars).

As I aged, I developed an addiction to books of all sorts: histories, biographies, novels, poetry, how-to-do-it and self-help books, medical texts, hymnals. Hymnals and lives of the saints were staple reading in grade school. Car repair manuals certainly took preference over assigned Latin writings on the Punic wars when I was in high school.

Considering what a klutz I was at 20, self-help books were little less than survival rations. Poetry was a bit of a surprise reserved for my mature years, when I discovered what it was like to read Blake and Wordsworth and Tennyson and Yeats in depth. And they all appeared in a traditional form, printed on white paper in black ink. I wonder whether any of them would have much weight when rendered as bits and bytes, with my mind shouting in the background that once these words have passed, they are gone forever.

That’s really what bugs me about this so-called revolt against the printed word. There is something charming about knowing that dozens and hundreds have handled and read – and even set aside – the book you are reading.

Copies of “Moby Dick” rarely vanish because of wear, but surprising numbers of other “hard” novels from writers like Hemingway and Austen and Conan Doyle and Pirsig most certainly do. Really old books – experts call them “incunabula” – literally put history in your hands (and, yes, there are libraries that will let you read – if not take out – books printed before 1501). There is a limitless community of readers and their beloved physical volumes. Not so those who read at volts- rather than words-per-minute.

Supposedly, books are to be no more. Electronic novels and biographies and autobiographies will exist for the moment, like the “books” written by aspiring political candidates. They will grasp a short period of history in a limited universe, offer the insights conventional to those they want to vote for them, and be passed out or hawked like political buttons.

I wonder if anyone, other than the Library of Congress, will preserve them. Picture “Antiques Roadshow” babbling about the value of Scott Walker’s “Unintimidated” or Bill Clinton’s “My Life” or Rick Santorum’s “Blue Collar Conservatives.”

Will book survive? More than 292,000 new titles showed up in the U.S. last year and some 500 million copies were sold. Don’t figure it out: that’s a little more than 1,700 copies sold per title, which means lots of books sell very few (ask me; I can testify to the fact). On the other hand, it is evident, lots of us are still reading words printed on paper. Maybe not television personalities, though.

Oshkosh Northwestern Community Columnist Tom Herzing is a former teacher, administrator, politician, and author.